Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: ANCIENT (06/04/20)
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TITLE: Past Present Future | Previous Challenge Entry
By Debra Brand
06/10/20 -
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When I was a child, I had leafed through the chapters to study the colored plates of Israel. I thought ‘How foreign the lands looked’ and wondered what all the words meant. As I grew, my interest in this old book waned. Now, it is another of my mom’s mementos from the younger days of her life. I need to keep this book to keep a part of her heritage alive.
She gave up her last apartment and begrudgingly settled into a nursing home about four years ago. I have her costume jewelry in my nightstand. I use her step stool to reach my canned goods in the pantry. Many items in my house help me to feel her presence in the present.
But this bible is most important. In the back of the book, my mother’s handwriting recorded for her children a record of inheritance. Her grandfather had given the bible to her mother after a church trip in 1920. My mom inherited it when her mother passed away from pneumonia in 1924. They wouldn’t give quinine, the cure of the day, to pregnant moms.
So, this bible carries me back to a time of late 1800s and early 1900s when my great-grandparents on both sides immigrated to America from Wales and Switzerland. Whatever their reason to come here, lack of mining, a new beginning, or the threat of communism, I am glad to be here. All of my grandparents passed away before I was born or too young to remember them.
My great uncle Ben from Switzerland shepherded a church in Pennsylvania. My grandmother taught the children’s Sunday school. My great-grandfather’s family lived through the Welsh revival of the 1860s. This is the legacy I have built upon in my present positions at church. These are my generational blessings I hope to outlive me.
But the old American Standard Version intrigues me. The way people appeared educated by the structure of their sentences and eloquent verbiage is evidenced by the English language in the bible.
John 3:16 may have been a beloved passage for the ink of the word ‘God’ was retouched in pencil. The brown stained pages show evidence of liquid spills … possibly tears. Many pages of Genesis are missing.
The appendix consists of ‘Aids to Bible Studies’. Fourteen chapters of biblical information they had thought were important to place at the end of this book. “The Harmony of the Four Evangelists, Measures, Rivers and Brooks of Scripture, Money of OT and NT, and How to Study the ‘Sunday-School’ Lesson” are some of the study guides.
I believe I will not only cherish this book as an inheritance from the past but also to gain insight into the Word of God from a valuable resource.
“Thus saith Jehovah, stand ye in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way; and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls …” Jeremiah 6:16 NAS circa early 1900s.
Non-fiction
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